Kirkos Ensemble: Body Noise Work / Wilderness Notes

Body Noise Work, a Kirkos Ensemble project focusing on the creation of performance-based works exploring the body and its surroundings, led by the composer Jennifer Walshe.

The artists of Body Noise Work came together during a series of intensive workshops in and around Carrick-on-Shannon led by mentors Jennifer Walshe, John Godfrey, Vicky Langan and EL Putnam. The artists came from core disciplines of music (Sebastian Adams, Robbie Blake, Robert Coleman, Seán Ó Dálaigh and Susan Geaney), visual art (Sarah Ellen Lundy), interdisciplinary art (Natasha Bourke) and dance (Ruairí Donovan, Laura Sarah Dowdall), but all are deeply engaged in multiple media.

Body Noise Work, brought together 9 artists across disciplines to create an extraordinary evening over four floors of the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios on Saturday December 8th. Each artist demolished the divide between performer and creator, pulling the audience into brave new spaces and building their own separate but colliding worlds. Throughout the project ran the theme of interconnectedness between spaces, artists, and disciplines, creating a multidisciplinary and participatory artistic practice.

Wilderness Notes - Kirkos Ensemble and Experimental Film Society

Kirkos Ensemble and the Experimental Film Society present Wilderness Notes, an exciting collaboration bringing together two of Ireland’s most innovative contemporary arts group from the fields of music and film.

Fri - Sat 01 - 02.09.2017 :: Filmbase, 2 Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2

Wilderness Notes featured premieres of 3 new films by EFS filmmakers Rouzbeh Rashidi, Maximilian Le Cain and Vicky Langan, and Atoosa PourHosseini, created in tandem with new compositions by young Irish composers Barry O’Halpin, Seán Ó Dálaigh, and Robert Coleman which were performed live by the Kirkos Ensemble.

The three films that comprise Wilderness Notes all explore psychic, territorial and technological margins. Isolated characters, all somehow locked into masks or fixed personae, navigate desolate zones between dimensions where a sense of being physically adrift and at risk is mapped onto a corresponding inner state. But they are not only adrift in space, they are equally adrift in time. Making experimental use of several outdated moving image formats, notably Super-8 and VHS, Wilderness Notes summons up ghosts from an abandoned future, taking its cues from the western, the nightmare of nuclear holocaust and the masks of ancient theatre.

All three of Wilderness Notes’ musical compositions were written to complement EFS’s filmmaking approach. Barry O’Halpin’s is derived from the electromagnetic spectra of 5 chemical elements, resulting in an ethereal and almost alien set of harmonies and moving parts, while Seán Ó Dálaigh pits the ensemble against undulating sine waves and introduces an element of choice into structural repetitions to create a vibrant microtonal universe. In contrast, Kirkos co-director Robert Coleman’s contribution is a song cycle, setting poetry by American poet Morri Creech for voice, ensemble and electronics, examining the states of consciousness that flash beneath the waking mind.

For Wilderness Notes the Kirkos Ensemble was: Miriam Kaczor[flute], Leonie Bluett [clarinet], Máire Carroll [piano], Jane Hackett, Cillian O Breacháin [violins], Nathan Sherman [viola], Yseult Cooper Stockdale [cello], Barry O’Halpin [electric guitar] and Sarah Thursfield [voice].

The collaboration marked a new frontier in the experimental filmmaking and contemporary music scenes in Ireland, combining both groups’ radical approach to presenting their art and engaging with audiences in challenging and refreshing ways.

Wilderness Notes was presented by Kirkos Ensemble and the Experimental Film Society, with support from Ensemble Music and Filmbase, and is funded by Arts Council Ireland.